14 February 2026 · 4 min read
Polling is often enough
For updates measured in tens of seconds, a well-cached poll is simpler, cheaper, and easier to debug than a socket layer.
Conditional requests and sensible cache headers make polling far less expensive than teams assume.
Server-sent events for one-way streams
Notifications, live status, and streaming AI responses are one-directional. SSE handles them over plain HTTP with automatic reconnection.
It works on standard server runtimes with no special infrastructure.
WebSockets when you need bidirectional
Collaborative editing, chat, and multiplayer interaction genuinely need a socket. Accept the operational cost knowingly.
Plan for reconnection, message ordering, and state resync — these are where socket implementations usually fail.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing real-time architecture for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us